It appears that just about every state that applied for—and won—an escape from requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act had to tweak its plan to better demonstrate how it would address the needs of English learners. A weak spot for nearly all of them was how they would guarantee that ELLs could fully access the more rigorous coursework and curriculum expected to emerge from adoption of the common standards. Of course, this is a pressing issue in every state, waivers or not.

Here's a quick rundown, gleaned from each state's documents posted on the U.S. Department of Education's website.

COLORADO: The state added more detail to its plan to make sure ELLs and students with disabilities would have full access to the more-rigorous common-core standards. That included laying out professional development plans to include a wide swath of school staff, such as content teachers, language teachers, and literacy
coaches.

FLORIDA: This state's waiver was conditionally granted on the basis that the state will revise how it includes ELLs and students with disabilities so that their performance is fully reflected in the state's A through F grading system.

INDIANA: Like Colorado, Indiana also laid out in more detail how it would make sure that ELLs and students with disabilities access the common-core standards and are fairly assessed on them. The state has technical assistance centers that will support districts to do this.

KENTUCKY: Another state that needed to beef up the details on how it would ensure that ELLs would get access to the more-rigorous common standards, Kentucky said it will partner with the University of Louisville to provide professional development to all teachers who work with ELLs.

MASSACHUSETTS: This state provided more detail on how it will include academic growth of ELLs and students with disabilities into its guidance for school districts that are developing teacher- and leader-effectiveness measures.

MINNESOTA: This is yet another state that had to address how it would train teachers to make sure ELLs and students with disabilities don't miss out on the rigor of the common-core standards. (We are officially beyond the old newsroom standard that "three is a trend" and have moved into the "four is a theme" territory)

NEW JERSEY: And our count goes up to five. New Jersey, too, had to show how its professional development plan for moving teachers to the common-core standards will address the needs of ELLs and students with disabilities.

OKLAHOMA: Make it six. Oklahoma also addresses the common core for ELLs by requiring each school that receives interventions to include a "Language Instruction Educational Plan" for each ELL and provide training for all teachers on improving achievement for ELLs.

TENNESSEE: The final tally is seven. Tennessee joins the other six states in having to pledge more to ensure that ELLs will access the common standards. This state also added more detail on how it will factor the performance of ELLs and students with disabilities into its teacher-evaluation system.

Notably, Georgia was the only waiver state that didn't appear to have to address any ELL-related issues in its revised plan.

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Arne Duncan sat down today with José A. Rico, the executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, to discuss education issues important to the Latino community. The education secretary answered queries from people who submitted them via Twitter and Facebook.

For those who couldn't tune in or won't have time to read the tweets, here's a recap:

On college aspirations for undocumented students, Duncan said "it's absolutely crazy" for states not to provide access to higher education to these students on a level playing field, such as in-state tuition and financial aid. He said he and President Obama would continue pushing for the passage of the federal DREAM Act.

On reducing dropout rates for Latinos AND strengthening the teaching corps, Duncan said the field is in desperate need of Hispanic teachers, especially men. Roughly 22 percent of the nation's K-12 enrollment is Hispanic, but less than 2 percent of the nation's teaching pool is made up of Latino males. Having teachers and administrators who come from the same communities is a key to keeping students engaged in their schooling, he said.

Duncan called on Latino parents to enroll their children in preschool and other high-quality, early childhood programs, stressing that the early years are key to being ready for kindergarten and later academic success. As a subgroup, Latinos are the least likely to participate in preschool.

"We really need Latino mothers and fathers to say 'this is the right thing for my child,'" Duncan said. Rico, a former principal in Chicago, agreed, saying that increasing Latino enrollment in preschool "could be a huge game changer."

Dolores Huerta, the long-time civil rights activist and labor leader, asked what can be done to encourage more parental engagement in the Hispanic community. Duncan said that the Education Department is requesting that Congress double the budget for parent engagement to $240 million a year. "We want to scale [up] what is working in local communities," he said.

The secretary also said he'd like to see more school districts adopt robust foreign language programs, saying it's the "norm" in other countries that are among America's biggest global competitors.

Finally, when asked about how to get more Hispanic students participating in advanced STEM courses, Duncan said the key was teachers. Namely, he added, making sure there is a good supply of teachers who are "competent and fluent" in the STEM subjects and paying them more, especially those who go to work in disadvantaged communities. He stressed the need for more science fairs, robotics programs, mentoring, and internship opportunities in the STEM field. "It's about exposure," he said.

Saying that technology can be the great "equalizer," the secretary gave a huge plug to the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that has built a collection of thousands of lessons in math, science and other subjects that are free to anyone on its website.

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UPDATE: The newly-released guidebook is still considered a draft until a final version is published in early March. Education Department folks say they don't expect substantive changes, however.

The U.S. Department of Education today released a guidebook to help states set new proficiency standards and academic achievement targets for English-language learners.

The report, commissioned by the education department and written by ELL experts at the American Institutes of Research, the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research, and WestEd, describes empirical methods state policymakers may use to determine exactly what English proficiency means for students, how long it should take students to reach it, and how to factor in those proficiency levels when measuring progress in the academic content areas.

The guidebook, called "National Evaluation of Title III Implementation Supplemental Report: Exploring Approaches To Setting English-Language Proficiency Performance Criteria and Monitoring English-Learner Progress," is directed at assessment and accountability officials in state departments of education, as well as senior state education agency officials, those who provide technical assistance and people who advise education governing boards.

The release of the guide comes at a key time for states, many of which are in the process of seeking to escape provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act by applying for flexibility waivers. In those applications, states must address how they will hold schools accountable for the language and academic proficiency of English learners. It also comes at a time when states are beginning to adopt the Common-Core academic standards and must grapple with how to adapt those so that English learners may fully access them.

It is the first of four reports to be released as part of a four-year study undertaken by AIR to evaluate Part A of Title III, the provision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that provides federal grants to states and local school districts to education English-language learners.

Robert Linquanti, a senior research associate at WestEd and one of the guidebook's authors, said the new publication is meant to "start the discussion" with state policymakers on three key questions:

1. How to determine what the "finish line" is for English-language proficiency;

2. How long should it take students to reach that definition of proficiency once you account for where they started and how long they've been receiving services; and
3. How to account for English-proficiency levels when setting expectations for students' academic progress

To answer the first question, the guidebook outlines three analytical methods policymakers can follow. On the second question, the researchers describe two ways states may use to figure out the time frame for an English learner to reach a certain proficiency standard. And on the third question, the guidebook describes three approaches states may use to account for students' proficiency levels when setting goals for their academic progress.

All of the approaches rely on using information mined from the longitudinal data systems states have been building to monitor student achievement.

Linquanti and co-author H. Gary Cook, who is the research director for the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment consortium, a group that is developing a new assessment of English proficiency to be aligned with the common core, advise that states use a combination of some or all of the methods they describe. They also stress that this guidebook—summarized here—is not meant to be the final word on how states set proficiency standards and achievement targets for English learners.

"We see this as the beginning of the discussion," Linquanti said. "We don't think we have all the answers. What we aimed for here is to lay out some basic groundwork to give folks a strong, empirical base to start from."

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Does it seem possible that over the last decade, only one book series for early readers—those in the 2nd and 3rd grade range—features a main character who is Latino?

That rather stunning discovery was made by Jane Fleming, a professor at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, with her colleague Sandy Carrillo, a literacy and language specialist who works with English learners in a school district in suburban Chicago.

Actually, the one series the two educators did find featured a young Latina. There were no series in what Fleming calls "transitional chapter books" that feature a Latino boy. Transitional chapter books use text and illustrations to help young readers build bridges from just learning to read to reading more efficiently, and are, Fleming says, essential in helping kids build fluency and stamina for longer, more challenging texts.

Because these short chapter book series feature recurring characters and settings and have illustrations that support the text, they can be especially helpful to struggling readers and English learners, Fleming says.

But when it comes to reflecting the race, neighborhoods and experiences of many English learners and urban schoolchildren, the selection is shockingly thin.

Fleming and Carillo have done a thorough survey of the children's literature landscape, and came up with 210 short chapter book series that met their basic criteria. The series had to have at least three books in the collection and had to have been published in the last 10 years. The researchers also weeded out all of the series that weren't "realistic," meaning those that featured animals as main characters or those with stories that were fantastic. That left 40 series. And out of those, just one—called Get Ready for Gabí—had a Latino character. Series featuring African-American main characters were more plentiful, though most of them were girls.

Fleming and Carillo also found the inventory of books featuring urban scenes or neighborhood settings that would be familiar to many city kids was woefully small.

Fleming knows this issue well, and not just from doing exhaustive surveys as an academic. The professor works closely with urban school librarians and classroom teachers to help them build book collections with selections that students in city schools can relate to. She's also started a nonprofit organization called Kids Like Us with a mission of building a search engine that librarians and teachers can use to find titles for their students, as well as raising money to provide the books to schools.

Fleming and Carillo are in the middle of writing their paper on these findings. For teachers and librarians interested in getting in touch with Fleming, you can find her contact information at the Erikson Institute.

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New York has drafted its application to get out from under provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act and has been getting lots of feedback on how to improve its plan before submitting it to the U.S. Department of Education later this month.

New York will be the third among the "Big Seven" states—home to most of the nation's English learners—to formally seek a waiver. Florida and New Jersey were among the 11 early bird states that applied. And according to the Ed. Department's ESEA flexibility page, Arizona and Illinois will seek waivers too.

California is among a handful of states that have expressed deep reservations about the requirements of the waivers. And Texas hasn't given a clear signal on what it will ultimately do.

So that brings us back to New York, where advocates for English learners are asking writers of the state's waiver application to provide more details on how it will address the needs of ELLs.

In a letter to the state department of education, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund finds much to praise in the New York plan, including the state's effort to update its ELL standards and align those with the common standards, as well as the assessment used to measure English language proficiency.

But the letter outlines areas of concern, too. Chief among them is New York's plan to continue testing any ELL in grades 3-8 who has been enrolled for more than one year on the state's English/language arts exam, and using those results for accountability purposes. The letter says the state's plan would benefit from more specifics on how it will tailor interventions for ELLs as a whole and even more specifically for the diversity of ELLs in New York, such as long-term English learners and students with interrupted formal education.

We'll stay tuned to see if New York makes changes to its plan based on this feedback.

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Georgia lawmakers are debating a measure that would actually bar undocumented students from the state's public colleges and universities. The bill, say its supporters, is designed to keep illegal immigrants from taking spaces in Georgia's higher education system from legal residents.

In a hearing on the legislation yesterday, opponents—including some undocumented students—gave some gut-wrenching testimony about how the bill would kill their hopes and dreams.

The state already has a tough policy for undocumented students who want to attend its most elite campuses such as Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia. If those schools turn away academically qualified students—and they do routinely because of the demand to enroll in those schools—then they can't admit students who do not have legal status. And undocumented students who enroll in the state's other public institutions must pay out-of-state tuition.

The new measure would go even further by keeping students out of all of the state's public campuses if they don't have legal status.

If the legislation were adopted, Georgia would join just three other states with outright bans on undocumented students attending public colleges: Alabama, Arizona and South Carolina. Most other states that have wrestled with issues around illegal immigrants and higher education have focused on so-called Dream Acts, which have sought to provide in-state tuition levels and access to financial aid.

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For years, students who enrolled in U.S. schools with language skills other than English have not received much support in the school setting to keep developing proficiency in their native languages to become truly bilingual, biliterate adults.

But today's Houston Chronicle has an interesting story on the rising popularity of heritage language courses in the public schools there in the Houston area that may signal that some change is afoot. The heritage courses are designed to help students who are already fluent in English, but growing up in households where another language is spoken, maintain and strengthen literacy in their native languages.

More than 57 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That number alone would suggest that there could be strong demand for K-12 schools to help the students in those homes keep and develop their heritage language. But the polarizing politics around immigration and bilingual education is one reason why creating and funding such programs has been difficult.

Heritage speakers aren't likely to benefit as much in a regular foreign-language class with non-native speakers, experts say. They need different curriculum and instructional strategies tailored for their more-sophisticated language skills.

While the Chronicle story says that the "number of programs and languages offered has exploded" in high schools and colleges over the last decade, it doesn't report any actual data. The National Heritage Language Resource Center is collecting survey data from colleges and universities on an ongoing basis to compile a database of heritage-language programs in higher education.

And the Center for Applied Linguistics has also built a database of heritage-language programs across the spectrum of community-based programs, school-based programs, and those in higher education. The CAL database has collected information on more than 60 school-based heritage programs nationwide and 263 community-based programs.

I'd like to learn more about programs that have sprung up and are flourishing in K-12 public schools, so please send any that you know of my way.

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Texas policymakers are putting the onus on the state's colleges and universities to notify undocumented students who pay in-state tuition rates that they must hold up their end of the deal and seek legal status.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board ruled yesterday that the state's higher education institutions must send annual notices to undocumented students reminding them to pursue legal status by contacting federal authorities. Those notices will start going out as early as this summer.

The change comes more than a decade after Texas became the first state to pass "Dream Act" legislation that allows eligible undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates and public colleges and universities. Under the Texas' law, students must sign an affidavit promising to seek legal status but no entity has been directly tasked with the responsibility for following up.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry's support for in-state tuition for undocumented students and his strong statements on the issue have been blamed, in part, for his failure to become a viable candidate in the GOP presidential primary sweepstakes.

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For a few minutes during last night's debate in Florida, three of the four GOP presidential candidates explained why they believe English should be the official language of the United States.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney were asked specifically why they support a policy of printing government documents—and potentially election ballots—only in English, but have no qualms about running Spanish television and radio advertisements seeking votes.

Gingrich's answer was to point out that while Spanish is the most widely-spoken language in the U.S. after English, it is just one among hundreds of others. To unify the country, he argued, requires a single language that all citizens share. He seemed to suggest that political campaigns are different because candidates have always been "willing to go to people on their terms and their culture..." to win support.

He also said that ballots should be in English, but that there could be programs "where virtually everybody would be able to read the ballots." (PK12, by the way, explains Gingrich's position on the federal DREAM Act legislation.)

Romney, in a rare moment of agreement with Gingrich during last night's debate, said his opponent was "right," before pivoting to to talk about how in Massachusetts in 2002, he "campaigned for English immersion in our schools."

Notably, when Romney was campaigning for governor in 2002, it was at the same time that voters were considering a ballot initiative to end bilingual education. Roger Rice, a Massachusetts-based civil rights lawyer who works on issues related to English learners, recalls that folks from both political parties, including the Republican governor at the time, Jane Swift, had come out to oppose Question 2—the ballot initiative to limit bilingual education—in favor of a legislative solution to ensure that more English learners in the state would learn the language.

But Romney, according to Rice, decided to make the matter a "wedge issue," especially since his Democratic opponent, Shannon O'Brien, also favored the legislative solution backed by Gov. Swift. In his book that came out last year, Romney highlighted his position on bilingual education vs. English immersion.

Congressman Ron Paul—sticking to his belief that the federal government ought to leave states and localities to govern themselves—said that while English should be the national language, federal policymakers ought not to meddle in decisions about which languages appear on ballots.

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum didn't get a shot at answering the question, but I doubt his answer would have differed much from his opponents, given his own stance on English-only.

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More than 60 elementary schools in Florida are the focus of a new research project that will examine how English-language learners fare after receiving a new science curriculum that is designed to also reinforce their language development.

Okhee Lee, an education professor at New York University and a well-known expert on ELLs and science, is working on the project with two other NYU colleagues. A $4.5 million National Science Foundation grant is paying for the four-year study that seeks to illuminate how science achievement can be improved for ELLs.

Science achievement for students learning English trails that of their peers, a problem, Professor Lee says, that is exacerbated by the urgency to teach ELLs to read and do math. Often, she says, ELLs don't receive science instruction at all.

Lee has developed a curriculum and professional development for teachers known as "Promoting Science among English Language Learners (P-SELL)," which has been used in the Miami-Dade school system. Sean Cavanagh wrote about the Miami-Dade project for Education Week a few years ago.

With P-SELL, elementary teachers receive a lot of training to boost their science content knowledge and instructional strategies for teaching the content to ELLs. In Miami-Dade, science and math scores rose for ELLs who were part of the P-SELL program.

With this new grant, Lee and her colleagues are branching out to elementary schools in Jacksonville, Fort Myers, and Orlando, where half of the schools will use the P-SELL curriculum and professional development program and half will use the science curriculum adopted by their home school districts.

I am certain the results of this project will be highly anticipated, and hopefully, we will hear progress reports along the way. The project should wrap up by the end of 2015.

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